


The Landmark

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (sort of), ...ish, Brotherly Banter, Case Fic, Crack, M/M, Original Characters - Freeform, fuck yeah wisconsin, sort of...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 05:12:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9306767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: A phantom Harley riding down other bikers leads the boys to a town where they find many things they did not expect. Nutcracker dolls dressed in biker gear? Gigantic crosses lit up with Christmas lights? In August? Only in Wisconsin.[A shameless celebration of the weird and wonderful that Imp and I came across several months ago while on a writing retreat in the kind of place where you couldn't help but speculate, 'what would Sam and Dean be saying about all this?']





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ImpishTubist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImpishTubist/gifts).



“Is this one gonna end up with you screwing an ex you’ve never told me about?” Sam asked. Dean had been shutting down his attempts at conversation for the past hundred miles, the unevenly spaced street lights were throwing his brother’s profile into strange relief, and Sam was feeling restless. 

Dean shot a look over at him, but what that look was was lost in the glare of another Harley’s high beams. “You gonna be a little bitch about it if it does?”

“I wasn’t a bitch about it last time.”

“Yeah, that’s what you say.” Dean changed the radio station and Sam said, “Turn here.”

It was the fourth day of the Milwaukee Harley Rally, and so far each day had ended with a random biker being run down by ‘a big fucking bike, ugly tricked out thing like I’ve never seen before,’ according to one witness, that seemed to vanish into thin air — possibly literally — leaving bloodstained blacktop and little else behind. This had happened before, eight years ago, and seven years before that, and seven years before that. It was supposed to have been put to rest eight years ago by some guy Bobby knew, someone who was supposed to know their shit, and when the seventh year came around and the thing didn’t appear like clockwork as it had before, a sigh of relief was breathed and glasses raised and no one gave it another thought. Until it started up again, right off schedule.

“The hell is that,” Dean muttered, leaning to look out the front window where a big cross, five feet high at least, was lit up in what looked like red Christmas lights. “Eerie piece of decoration, you ask me.”

“Easter seems to come earlier and earlier every year,” Sam mused, and Dean snorted, looking over at him with a grin.

The cross was above the entrance arch to a big, old cemetery, entirely incongruous with what Sam could see of the cemetery itself when the Impala’s headlights swept over the the solemn old headstones and hulking mausoleums. Then Sam gave a theatrical shudder and pointed to the sign. “What’s that, eleven this month?”

“Twelve, passed one while you were sleeping outside Tulsa.”

“Ugh. It’s just tempting fate, I swear,” Sam said, for probably the five hundredth time since he turned nine. But seriously ‘Resurrection Cemetery’? Creepy.

“Come on, Sammy, you know you want the zombie apocalypse as much as anyone. Think how much ass we’re gonna kick!”

“Think how freaking bored you’re gonna be after the first week. You bitch when we end up with two poltergeists in a row!”

“Well poltergeists are dicks,” Dean muttered, coasting to a stop at a crossroads. “We’re here. Which one?”

There were two bars kitty-corner to each other, the Landmark and the Fox Den. “Um…” Sam rifled through his notes, then looked up at the street sign. “Hang on, it's supposed to be on Freistadt Road, is this, is Freistadt the name of the town, too?”

Dean made a hurry-up motion at Sam. “I got people behind me here, dude.”

“That one, it’s gotta be.” Sam pointed across the street at the Landmark, and Dean pulled in to the tiny parking lot, working that Harry Potter magic trick where he made something the size of a tank fit into a spot a Fiat would have balked at. Sam got out of the car, taking in the night air, buzz of crickets and traffic noise from all sides, stretching his arms above his head and yawning hugely. The road had been overflowing with Harleys and so was the lot. There was a group of three men and two women, all leather-clad, smoking outside the front door, and Dean laughed when a bike revved down the road and made Sam jump.

Sam glared at his brother, but Dean just grinned and knocked his elbow against Sam’s, leading the way inside.

“What were you saying,” he asked, walking through first but holding the door for Sam, “the name of the town?”

“What? Oh, nothing. Just, Freistadt. Should we be worried?” Dean frowned at him. Sam rolled his eyes. “It’s German, it means ‘free state.’ Or…maybe it’s ‘free city.’ I just mean—“

“Yeah, two, please,” Dean stepped in front of Sam, cutting him off and probably winking at the bartender who was looking their way with two fingers held up and a question on her face.

“Name?” She called back over the noise of the bar.

“Samanth—Sam.” Dean turned and glared at Sam, and made a point of limping away from Sam and his toe-stomping boots.

Sam followed him into the corner by one of the gambling machines, watched as Dean idly plugged in a quarter and punched a few buttons. The place was crowded but not raucous; at a glance there were three different families there with young kids amid the more usual crowd of bikers and drinkers and late-nighters. Half the length of the building was taken up by a scarred wooden bar with a few high top tables scattered around, and then off to the right, semi-separate, was a seating area with booths and tables. 

“I’m just saying,” Dean said suddenly, “a possessed motorcycle doesn’t have to be anything out of the ordinary, I mean those things get wrecked all the time, bikers are tough old bastards who don’t want to let go, it’s more weird that we haven’t had more phantom bikes to deal with.”

“And I’m just saying,” Sam rallied himself to say, again, “that an average biker run off the road would be going after cars, not other bikes.”

“And I’m just saying—“

“Yeah, Dean, I know what you’re saying, all right? And I’m not disagreeing with you, for the hundredth time!”

“How freaking long are we gonna have to wait, do you think?” Dean asked, looking around. “I mean I don’t mind waiting I just wanna know how long we’re gonna wait.”

Sam looked around, then sidestepped Dean to tap the shoulder of a woman standing near them. He talked to her for a minute then turned back to Dean. “They came in just before us, she said the guy at the end of the bar,” he pointed to an older patron who was standing behind his barstool and who, just at the moment they looked over at him, stooped to kiss the woman he was with. After a beat, Sam cleared his throat and continued in a rush, “she said that guy told her they were just leaving and they could have their seats, so after that we’re next.”

“Damn,” Dean said, eyes still on the couple across the room while Sam’s were on him. “Pretty spry for an old guy. He’s definitely gettin’ some tonight. You figure that’s his wife, or like, is this some Harley hookup thing?”

“She also said this place has the best fish fry in the area, so make of that what you will.”

Dean turned around, turned a full watt smile on him. “Hey, we’re in Wisconsin, right, and is it…yeah, it’s Friday isn’t it? Fuck yeah, I’m having fish fry!”

The amorous elderly couple left, the other couple took their place, and five minutes later Dean was telling the waitress to start frying up some haddock for him and come back in five minutes when my brother has decided what kind of salad he wants. 

—

“No, no freaking way, man!”

“Come on, Dean!”

“Life and death Sammy, no time!”

“Come on dude, this is—“

“The fifth this month, I freaking know, all right?”

“Okay turn right up here, but we’re stopping once we’re done here, if I have to pull the emergency break.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You think that if it makes you happy.”

Dean was glaring at him, and almost missed his turn from Dean Road onto Fox Lane.

Sam would get him to stop and take a picture with the Dean street sign if it meant faking a nausea attack to get Dean to pull over; Dean did not fool around when people threatened to puke in his baby.

They pulled up outside an entirely nondescript duplex on a cul-de-sac of entirely nondescript duplexes. This whole subdivision…thing…had confused the hell out of Sam, and he wasn’t used to being confused by anything they ran into on the road. It was just that he couldn’t figure out where its nexus was. Yeah, it was close to Milwaukee, but not that close, and yeah it had that big road with the strip mall just down the way, but it wasn’t Illinois where that was how the little towns were, not like this was Crystal Lake or something. 

But anyway, here they were. After talking to people in the Landmark last night, and a busy night on the spotty internet Sam managed to steal after that, squatting in the damp grass outside the Mequon library in the pitch dark with gnats and moths flocking to his screen, here they were. The best lead they’d come up with, and it was a freaking duplex in a freaking manicured suburb. There were two cars parked in the driveway, an aging neon-green Dodge and an entirely forgettable newish silver Honda. He spared a moment to wonder what else was parked in the garage, if they were interrupting a party, if it was too early in the morning to be knocking on doors in a neighborhood like this, but Dean was already there with his finger to the bell.

Shadows flitted across the window as Sam stepped up next to Dean, the familiar flurry of people not expecting someone at the door, calling to each other and probably holstering knives and handguns and casting protection spells while peeping through the curtains. Sam checked the safety on his gun and let his hands fall to his sides, raising his eyebrows at his brother.

The door cracked, and two twenty-something girls peered out at them, both holding their phones in the hands probably with their thumbs poised above 9-1-1, the one on the left not letting go of the door so that it stalled out barely halfway open.

“Hi,” Dean said, smiling. “We’re looking for Jeanie, are you…?”

“She’s not here,” the taller girl said, shaking her head. “Are you booked here, or…?”

“Do you know when she’ll be back?” Sam asked, ignoring his brother’s quick ‘what the hell?’ glance back at him.

“Um, Monday probably,” the other said, glancing between them then down at her phone.

“So is Jeanie your….mom?”

The girls looked at each other, then back at them, only slightly relaxing from their ‘who are these stalkers at our door’ faces into ‘who are these idiots interrupting our lazy Sunday morning’ faces. “She owns this place, we’re renting it for the weekend? Air BnB?”

While Dean made the kind of lovable, distracting idiot of himself that came so natural to him, Sam took the opportunity to peer over his shoulder (make that short and lovable and distracting) and into the living room. Directly opposite the door was a wooden cross painted gold with probably-german lettering across it that he couldn’t make out, and to the left a curio cabinet with its whole bottom shelf dedicated to out of season knick-knacks.

“We’ll call Jeanie and sort it out,” Sam said, speaking over Dean and taking his brother by the shoulder, pulling him back from the door towards the steps and nearly tripping over the cement armadillo statue thing that took up half of the minuscule front porch. 

“Dude, what the hell? I was just starting to get somewhere!” Dean hissed at him, stalking back toward the street.

“Yeah, halfway to a restraining order. Dude, there were biker dolls in there, specifically nutcracker dolls. Remember last year, the—“

“Yeah, the uh, that Steinbach thing—“

“Exactly. I’m not saying this is that, exactly, but if there’s a pissed-off spirit haunting the roads and coming home to roost somewhere, and all signs are pointing to here…”

“Then it’s probably hanging out in one of those dolls.” Dean nodded, then glanced back at the house as they slid into the car. “Think those girls are in any danger?”

Sam shrugged. “Only maybe as collateral if something happens. They’re, what, vacationing here?”

“Yeah, apparently you can rent people’s houses for cheaper than hotels? Dude, we gotta check this out.”

Sam stared at Dean until Dean looked back, then he rolled his eyes and made with the ‘start the car already, dumbass’ gesture, and got a smack to his shoulder for his trouble. Then a minute later he was getting smacked upside the head when he made Dean stop, saying he needed something from the trunk, then took so long that Dean got out to hurry him up. So make that a smack upside the head and a picture of Dean’s grumpy face with the Dean Road street sign above his head.

—

“Okay, so I get your point, I know you’re thinking about that racist truck,” Dean said, startling Sam into looking up from his computer. “But a) why here and why now and why Harleys, and b) why are you pissed off at me.”

“I’m not pissed at you, Dean,” Sam said shutting his computer with a snap. “If I’m acting pissed it’s because you’re being stupid about this whole thing.”

“What ‘whole thing,’ there is no ‘whole thing’ here!”

“No? Well it sure seems like it from here.”

“Well maybe if you didn’t have your head up in the clouds you wouldn’t have such crazy ideas.”

“Crazy ideas like, oh, we’ve seen something like this before, let’s try and figure out what other motives this spirit could have?”

“Yes! I’m just saying we haven’t really seen this before—“

“Oh for the love of — I’m going for a walk.” Sam grabbed his jacket and motel key and slammed out the door without looking back.

“You know,” Sam said half an hour later, when Dean fell into step with him as Sam rounded the corner. “I wasn’t actually talking about Cassie and the racist tuck thing, until you were.”

Dean just grunted, digging his hands into his pockets.

“I meant Molly, remember her? And Greely, those ghosts on Nevada 41.”

It took Dean a moment, but then he sucked in a breath, let it out through his teeth. “Yeah.”

Sam nodded too. “I was just thinking, these things sometimes have patterns we don’t understand at first glance. Molly and Greely usually took out happy couples. This biker spirit who should be a simple road-killed haunting has super strength because he’s anchored to some local demesne, who’d have seen that coming.”

Dean darted a look at him, then peered forward through his sunglasses. “I like it when you use your big words, Sammy,” he said finally, subdued. 

Sam sighed. “With all the German heritage influence in this area, I’m just saying we should be prepared for some creepy possessed nutcracker to come after us when we break into that house tonight.”

“Dude, remember that episode of X-Files?” Dean gave shudder, then turned to Sam with a rictus smile. “I want to play!”

“Dude, cut it out,” Sam shoved him off the sidewalk, Dean stumbled half a step then turned to drive his shoulder into Sam’s. They grappled the whole way back to the motel, and called a truce when Dean broke the light fixture outside their door by shoving Sam into it. Sam took a shower and got the glass out of his shoulder, Dean declared it didn’t need stitches, and they were so awkward with each other the rest of the day that Sam was ready to punch something by the time they got into the car and turned their headlights back towards the subdivision.

Sam had noticed earlier that the big front casement windows didn’t have screens in them, so after they’d sidled up to the house and stood watch for awhile, not seeing any signs of movement inside, he got out his knife, tripped the lock, and eased one of them open. The curio cabinet wasn’t locked but its door squeaked loudly, so Sam made a blind grab for everything on the bottom shelf and shot back out the window, leaving Dean to wrench it closed while he dumped his armful into the open trunk and slid into the passenger seat.

“Seriously though,” Sam was grumbling ten minutes later, passing Dean a shovel. “We can’t be the only ones to think the name is creepy, why is it even a thing?”

“Give it a rest, dude,” Dean said. They were way way in the back of Resurrection Cemetery, shielded from view of the road by a big old crypt and about a thousand oversized tombstones. The ground was soft and it didn’t take long to have a shallow grave dug, and Sam retrieved the armload of dolls and nutcrackers and random mementos and dumped them into it. Dusting off his hands, Dean picked up his shovel again and leaned on it, watching Sam. “Happy couples, huh?”

“Yeah, uh, I guess. I looked into it some more afterwards, and…yeah.” Sam passed over the gas can. “The things friends usually said about the missing couples had a definite theme, all,” Sam cleared his throat and imitated a witness’s breathy voice, “’They squabbled a lot but that’s just how they were, they liked to argue but they were crazy in love, you know?’”

Dean was quiet, emptying the lighter fluid over the grave and digging a book of matches out of his pocket. “Any last words?” 

Sam shrugged. “Light it on fire and hope for the best?”

Dean made a considering frown-shrug-nod kind of combo, then lit the match and tossed it into the grave. A cacophony of screeching tires and revving engines accompanied the Woomph of fire and accelerant making friends, and Sam and Dean each reached for the shotguns, moving to stand back to back and peering into the night. The wailing died away quickly, though, and they turned to see a whispy blue-green specter rising out of the fire. All Sam could make out of him was a bandana on his forehead and blissful smile on his face before a phantom wind picked up, whipping his ghostly hair around, and then he seemed to shatter into pieces that rose up into the night, the fire dying down immediately and leaving the night sky brighter than before as ghost-bits flew up like fireflies to join the stars.

“So that was weird,” Sam said finally.

“You think?” Dean kicked at the pile of dirt beside his foot, sending clods back down into the now-smoldering grave, then he rounded on Sam. “Are you saying you argue with me all the damn time because that’s what makes you happy?”

“Dean, what — no?” Sam took a step back, and Dean shot out a hand to grab him by the wrist, and Sam went still as the gravestones around him while Dean peered into his face.

Dean let him go, started to step back, but Sam was there with his hand twisted in Dean’s shirt, his turn to hold on.

“Sammy,” Dean said, head to one side and warning.

“What?”

“You wanna do this right here, middle of zombie territory?”

Sam glanced around, took in the eerie shadows cast by gravestones in the dying light of their nutcracker fire, and shrugged. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Okay, then.” Dean’s hand on the back of Sam’s neck pulled him close, made Sam duck his head down and meet his brother halfway.


End file.
